


fragments against the ruin

by thegeneralgirl



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 02:52:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15986078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegeneralgirl/pseuds/thegeneralgirl
Summary: King Rhoam calls him brave for dying, but Link looks to the Calamity in the distance, and the only thought that sounds in his head is that he’d left her all alone.





	fragments against the ruin

**Author's Note:**

> > [...]These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
>> 
>> \- _The Wasteland_ , T.S Eliot

 

_  
Link, wake up._

  
From the moment his consciousness surfaced, before he’d even opened his eyes, the Princess had been Link’s lodestar in the blank space of his memories.

He doesn’t think he could ever describe that first moment of wakefulness—the complete and utter lack of a sense of self. More than not knowing when or where or how or why, the yawning nothingness inside himself had been—

Her voice had saved him; she’d given him a name, and then a purpose, and in return Link will save a land that he no longer remembers.

 

  
_The princess survived to face Ganon alone._

 

King Rhoam calls him brave for dying.

Link looks to the Calamity in the distance, and the only thought that sounds in his head is that he’d left her all alone.

**  
**

  
Impa tells Link a story: a hero, a princess, a king, and the divine destinies that they each had to play out.

 _Follow your heart and your destiny_ , Impa implores. _Do your duty and save Hyrule_ , she implies.

None of it—a prophecy; the grandeur of a greater purpose—rings true for him. Link instead thinks still of the Princess, trapped in the crumbling ruins of her castle, embraced by malice for a hundred years.  

All the other names and faces are only thoughts in the abstract, but her voice had been in his head. Her voice had been the first thing he’d known. He would stop this Calamity, if only to hear her words fill the space around him in reality.

 

 

_You are Princess Zelda’s only hope._

**  
**

Every memory Link recovers propels him forward. His past is a distant series of events and his present is still as vast and empty as Hyrule’s fields; the Princess is the only thing that keeps him grounded, and with every recollection she is less the legend and more the girl that he’d known.

His heart lifts every time he sees a silent princess in the wild.  

He wonders how long they’d been able to travel together, if he’d had the privilege to show her the beauty of her land before he’d failed her. In case they hadn’t had the time, Link quietly catalogues every cliff, every plain, every view that manages to take his breath away.

 _Look_ , he wants to be able to say to her, _look at what you saved_.

 

  
_What lies beneath the calm waters…_

Link scales the walls of Hyrule Castle before he’s ready, the promise of another familiar place—another memory—too tempting to ignore. The tower he stumbles into entirely on accident, but he thinks his Princess must have been guiding him somehow when he finds the crumbling journal.

He reads it once, and then twice, and then again until he has memorized even the shape of her handwriting.  

More than the glimpses of the man that she’d known, the man that he’d been, Link treasures the affection he can feel through her words. Impa had said that he’d been a comfort to her, and Link hopes that his Princess—that Zelda—had managed to share her burdens with him after all. He knows he would have—that he still would—carried them without complaint for as long as she needed.

  
  
  
 

There is a moment in Link’s memories that he cherishes above all others:

Zelda, green eyes flashing, her hair a golden arc as she spins to face him, mobile mouth already at work as she’d first berated him in anger, and then later, when they’d bridged their misunderstandings, passionate debate or lecture about ancient Sheikah tech or Robbie’s newest experiments.

Link thinks that must be why he’d always lagged a few steps behind; not only for her safety or the sake of decorum, but because one of the most beautiful sights in the world had been of Zelda and her bright eyes and her golden smile, a few precious seconds that had spoke of _hello_ and light and warmth—

And love; in the end, there’d been love.

  
_Her smile is like the sun; I would do much to feel it upon me again._

Experiencing the Deku Tree’s memory of Zelda is agonizing. Hearing her speak to the Master Sword, knowing that she’d stood here and held the blade as he holds it now, Link thinks he has never felt closer to her. If he shuts his eyes and concentrates hard enough, it is almost as if she’s here, right in front of him, her hands still wrapped around the pommel of the sword, his fingers curled tightly over hers.

There is a callous on her right thumb; he wonders if this is a conjured detail or a real truth, and then decides that it doesn’t matter. It is real enough.

  
_I remembered all the things we've been through together._  
_[...] I wish to see her smiles again with my own eyes._

There is no light in the Inner Sanctum. The malice is so thick that Link thinks he would have choked on it, if not for the blade of evil’s bane. It hums reassuringly in his hand, eager for the fight.

Link charges.

  
  
  
 

Ganon dies a pitiful shadow of itself—fitting, since it is all that remains when Link spears the Master Sword through the center of the creature’s power. The light that explodes outwards is sudden and blinding, and Link struggles to keep his eyes open so he will not miss the first moment that _she_ is freed.

But even when the light dims, even when the darkness is cleansed and Hyrule Castle is silent and ordinary once more, there is no Princess in the throne room; there is no Zelda to smile at Link.

  
  
  
 

He waits.

  
 

_Link, wake up—- -_

  
 

Link wonders when Zelda had whispered the plea last. Had she known, the moment she’d decided to return to face Ganon? Or had she held on for years, hoping that he would heal in time?

  
  
 

  
Link stays for a whole day and night, praying that he’s wrong, that she too only needed time to wake. But there isn’t even a body, and he eventually climbs out of the castle alone.

There are people waiting for him at the gates: men from Riverside stable and Sheikah that Impa must have sent from Kakariko. Their cheers are deafening when he emerges from the mouth of what is now a cavernous tomb.

But Link ignores them, his head and his heart far away as he turns from the crowd and digs through his pack. He kneels, laying the small, carefully wrapped bouquet of silent princesses on the blackened flagstone, the people slowly growing silent at his display.

The Sheikah are the first to understand, falling to their knees behind him, laying their blades on the ground in homage.

Link wishes he couldn’t hear the fervent whispers, that all the people would leave. He is not kneeling in fealty or in tribute; it is grief, not duty, that keeps him bent to the ground, and it is not Hyrule’s Princess but Zelda that he mourns, Zelda that he misses, Zelda—smiling at him over her shoulder, offering him a hand—that he has failed, that he now has to face the vast world without.

 

  
  
  
He has nothing of her but a tattered journal and less than a year’s worth of memories.

He takes these, and traverses back to the places that he’d thought would awe her, scattering silent princess seeds behind him all the while.

On a wind-strewn bluff in Akkala, Hyrule spread wide and wild below him, Link stares at the trail of brilliant blue that has bloomed in his wake; a long time ago—more than a century, in fact—a girl that he’d loved had expressed her hope that they would thrive.

 _You have,_ Link thinks, _you have._

  
  
  
_**end** _


End file.
